I made one of my easiest sauces tonight. it’s from a Josceline Dimbleby book called Favourite Food and it’s well named. You cut a couple of red peppers a bit, six pieces each or so and cook them in water with several cloves of garlic. When they’re soft, squeeze the garlic from the husks and whizz them and the drained peppers in the liquidiser, adding some cream, salt and pepper. That’s it. She has you adding prawns, chicken pieces cooked in butter and briefly cooked courgette, but it’s a sauce that will go a lot of places. I just added prawns. Cooked tagliatelle, mixed together. I had some leftover cooked spinach, so I put a line of that along the top to pretty it up. Added a salad.

The other sauce that is really simple is a tin of chopped tomatoes, some pesto and some crème frâiche. No more needed other than seasoning. If you haven’t got crème frâiche, cream cheese with a little water or milk, cream with lemon juice, Greek yoghurt, even. Goes with all sorts of things, including on its own with pasta.

Rose has had an early night and I’ve been watching tv. I’m really trying to get back into the habit, I sleep better after some entertainment. I tried the other way – no screens, low lights and so on, for a long time and it didn’t help. Tim and I rarely watched television and we talked all evening, sometimes listened to music. I still didn’t sleep. I’m a child of the tv age, it seems. I can’t remember a time without television because my parents bought one to watch the coronation, before I was born.

I do remember the first TV, a big cabinet with a small screen. When you got horizontal lines going up and up, you had to hit it on the top. It took a minute or two to warm up and, when switched off, the picture faded to a dot, which finally vanished. Our second television, sometime in the early ’60s, was delivered on a Saturday afternoon. We were all very excited. It was a big screen with no cabinet and the delivery man set it up for us. Turned it on and the wrestling was on. We all recoiled at the sight of huge, sweaty men grappling, albeit in black and white.

A few years later, our neighbours were the first people in the village to get a colour television. We were invited in to see it and golf was on. They’d turned the colour right up, so the golfers’ faces were bright pink and the grass was vivid.